Biomedical subjects

Jessica A Barlow

Publications and source records attributed to Jessica A Barlow.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2005

Phonological change and the representation of consonant clusters in Spanish: a case study.

This single-subject case study evaluates effects of treatment of a complex onset on the sound system of a monolingual Spanish-speaking child (female, aged 3;9) with phonological delay. Pre-treatment, the child excluded all consonant+liquid clusters, as well as tap /[symbol: see text]/ and trill /r/. Immediately following training on /f[symbol: see text]-/ in non-words, the child generalized across consonant+liquid clusters and the tap singleton. These improvements continued to 2 months post-treatment follow-up, with the ultimate addition of the trill at that point in time. Consonant+glide sequences, whose structural status as complex onsets is debated in the Spanish phonology literature, patterned differently from consonant+liquid sequences. Specific findings are viewed in light of linguistic markedness, syllable structure, sonority sequencing, and the representation of consonant clusters.

Articulation Disorders↗

PubMed2003

Constraint conflict in cluster reduction.

When children reduce onset clusters to singletons, a common pattern is for the least sonorous member of the adult cluster to be produced. Within optimality theory (Prince & Smolensky, 1993), this pattern has been accounted for in terms of a fixed ranking of onset constraints that evaluate a segment's degree of sonority, whereby onset glides violate the highest ranked constraint, and onset stops the lowest. Not all children follow the sonority pattern, however. In this paper, we apply two fundamental principles of optimality theory to yield predictions about other children's cluster reduction patterns. The first principle is that of factorial typology, according to which all rankings of constraints should yield possible languages. To produce the sonority pattern, all conflicting constraints must rank beneath the onset sonority constraints. If they rank above the onset sonority constraints, these other constraints will force deviations from the sonority pattern. In this paper, we show how divergences from the sonority pattern are caused by three well-motivated conflicting constraints: *Fricative, *Dorsal, and Max-Labial. This is documented in the speech of two normally developing children (about 1;6-2;3) and a child with a phonological delay (3;8). The second principle we appeal to is that of emergent constraint activity, according to which the effects of violated constraints can be observed when higher ranked conflicting constraints are not at issue. We show that even when the onset sonority constraints are outranked by the conflicting constraints, under the right circumstances the sonority pattern does emerge in the forms produced by these children.

Child Language↗

PubMed2002

Minimal pair approaches to phonological remediation.

This article considers linguistic approaches to phonological remediation that emphasize the role of the phoneme in language. We discuss the structure and function of the phoneme by outlining procedures for determining contrastive properties of sound systems through evaluation of minimal word pairs. We then illustrate how these may be applied to a case study of a child with phonological delay. The relative effectiveness of treatment approaches that facilitate phonemic acquisition by contrasting pairs of sounds in minimal pairs is described. A hierarchy of minimal pair treatment efficacy emerges, as based on the number of new sounds, the number of featural differences, and the type of featural differences being introduced. These variables are further applied to the case study, yielding a range of possible treatment recommendations that are predicted to vary in their effectiveness.

Articulation Disorders↗